The sober and Catholic way to look at this without compromising with the world and being a sentimentalist is to understand that unless someone knowingly outside The Church showed some exterior/manifest signs of conversion before death then we are not to pray for them.  Doing so tells God that you think there's salvation outside of His Church

Well, my personal opinion is as yours, she did not make it, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves that God specifically made us so that we do not and cannot know where the dead go with certainty. When we say a short prayer for her, or for that matter any soul who is actually in hell, all God does is give those graces to some other soul who is not in hell. 

I'd say that if people believe there's salvation outside of the Church, then God already knows it.

Some of you will reach for anything to try to "save" someone outside The Church.  This doesn't even make sense because IF that were the case then there would be evidence of their conversion in "real time" that would manifest itself before the person's death.  Some of you will play these little scenarios and semantics that make no Catholic sense whatsoever so you can compromise with the world by seeming "nice."  Truth is not so nice sometimes. 

The sober and Catholic way to look at this without compromising with the world and being a sentimentalist is to understand that unless someone knowingly outside The Church showed some exterior/manifest signs of conversion before death then we are not to pray for them.  Doing so tells God that you think there's salvation outside of His Church or it turns into the whole "BoD" thing which is another can of worms altogether so I won't get into that here.  One could argue that "but...but...they may have become Catholic all of the sudden!"  That's an absurd notion just to try to "save" someone.  Even if that were granted in extremely rare cases it would still manifest itself as a deathbed conversion so people can actually see that they became Catholic before they died. 

Sorry to pick on your post specifically but I see this attitude here all the time and it needs to be called out. 

The fewness of the saved is a real thing and one people (myself included) should meditate on daily.  It's not "judging" someone to take Church Teaching to it's natural conclusion.  There are some in my family that died manifestly outside The Church, I'm not just going to say "well maybe they converted in their mind and some invisible person baptized them before death that I couldn't see" when they lived their lives outside The Church loving their sins until their death or other such semantics just because I loved them and would have preferred they were saved.  One shouldn't subject their feelings and sentimentalism to God's revealed Truth. 

Rare as it may be, do you deny that God, can extend His Mercy to a soul at the last minute?  He does as He wills as He is outside even His own precepts. It is a presumption either way for another human to have certainty over the final state of a soul so praying for a rare, last minute conversion at the time of death is a charitable thing to do. Of course it is unlikely but it isn't a farytale either. I think we will all be surprised at who actually is in Heaven and who isn't. God is able to examine the heart and we can't. We are limited and rightly bound by the doctrine of the Church, but we can appeal to His Mercy while the soul is still on earth- even at the last seconds of mortal life.

I agree- it can't become an obsessive-compulsive act to try and twist God's arm- as if that could happen. I just don't think people should confuse sentimentality with hope. We are supposed to have hope at the possibility God could offer a soul salvation at the last minute. Likelihood? Not very good especially for hard, obstinate sinners- they probably wouldn't choose God even at the moment of death.

No I wasn't.  Were you there when she died?  Do you know if she showed some exterior signs of conversion to The True Faith before her death?  If the answer is negative then one can safely assume they died as they lived.  If she showed some sign of pre-death conversion then it would be ok to pray for them.  Something like this would get announced or someone would know about it if she converted before death.  This wasn't published anywhere so one can safely assume they died as they lived. 

The Church Teaching follows logically from revealed Truth that there is no salvation outside The Church.  There are many quotes on this.  Cantate Domino by Pope Eugene IV, I can't remember the names of the other Encyclicals but there is also one by Pope Innocent III and others besides.  Praying for those manifestly outside The Church after their death (not before their death, by all menas please pray for the conversion of others before their death!) shows at least implicitly (but likely explicitly as well) that one believes there is salvation outside The Church. 

If you want more quotes I know Dimonds just released a video about more specific "do not pray for" quotes.

Assume is the key word here. Yes, I agree that we assume that she went to Hell, but we will never know for certain until we ourselves are in eternity. With that being said, since there is even a minuscule chance that she was saved, we can safely pray for her privately.

I forgot she was a scientologist. No point in praying as she was standing on a trap door straight to hell.

Harold Wallace Rosenthal described the UN as nothing more than a trap door to world communism; and he said further that the center of world communism had been moved from Russia (or New York City, e.g. the New York Fed) to Tel Aviv.

"Trap door" is an evocative image.

As far as baptism, faith, and salvation, it seems also to be a question of identity and difference in simple substance. Jesus asked the apostles, "who you say that I am", which was a difficult question, asked from that ontological level of simplicity at which Jesus was so comfortable. Who is anybody else either, besides who is Jesus, and what does this word "who" in the cosmos we experience really mean?

Since it may be difficult to get to the square root of two in these things, and questions like them,  Christianity has avoided being a cult of personality, or a great question box, but rather simply a cult of divine revelation, with rules for participants, and those also about salvation. This to me represents essentially a divinely (and accurately) revealed moral position first, imho, and something metaphysical later.

So who is anybody in the first place, more than a name, and what happens in the great beyond? It's easy for most mortals to get stuck in the bafflement there. The situation would speak for itself, however, to teach a moral point beyond doubt, whether someone is baptized and Christian or not, but to go deeper into the metaphysics of such a question, as into the develpoment outcome of the eternal fate of this or that person, it's not natural, imho, for mortals to pretend to know.

In some ways we only answer the question in our imagination to think this or that about whatever. No Catholic should celebrate "trap doors" from the enemy, or Scientology, or feel morally obligated to pray over stupid things, but there's always a point in praying, even if you don't know exactly what it is that much that you're really praying about anyway.

I could be praying for the public libray system in Chicago sometimes, for example, or an endangered species of bird or fish, and not even know it. I don't even like Chicago that much or Berlin just to mention another unknown. What really goes on in a place like Berlin that's any good anyway?

I don't want to derail a thread, but if Putin nukes Berlin, for example, well, an opinion could almost be like, "so be it", and be all right. Who's position is it that everybody should go around concerned about the fate of Berlin all day. Such things are not really that much more than another instance of fateful acceptance, out here in the land of the lost.

"So it goes", Billy Pilgrim used to say. "Cosi va".

King's English. Jay Leno can do this too. Who?

This is sheer unadulterated diamondite rubbish. The Catholic Chuch teaches no such things, never has and never will.

It doesn't teach that people should pray for people who die outside The Church.  There is no salvation outside The Church.  Period.  I know many people, especially women "trads", like to emote about this thinking how granny Smith who was a "nice" Protestant woman could possibly be in Hell since she made the best oatmeal cookies and smiled a lot.  Take it up with The Church if you don't like Her Teachings although I don't suggest such insolence.  Site where The Church says it's ok to pray for people who die outside The Church after their death.